David Schalkwyk on Shake the Sword!
What happens when Feste the fool meets Noël Coward? Was Shakespeare really that important to political prisoners on Robben Island? Why is Uys Krige’s Twaalfde Nag a better play than Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night? Do actors actually need directors? The answers are all in the first episode of Season 3 of the TCC’s podcast, Shake the Sword!
David Schalkwyk
Over the course of his distinguished career, David Schalkwyk has been Head of the English Department at the University of Cape Town, Director of Research and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, and Director of the Centre for Global Shakespeares at Queen Mary, University of London.
Currently, he’s a fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), which is less than an hour’s drive to the Maynardville Open-Air Theatre in Cape Town. So it wasn’t too difficult for Marguerite de Waal, founding editor of the all-new Bakwethu: A Journal of Shakespeare Studies, to persuade David to review the production of Twelfth Night that is currently on stage at Maynardville for the launch issue (watch this space, or follow Shakespeare ZA, for more announcements about Bakwethu).
David Viviers as Feste in Twelfth Night at Maynardville (pic: Claude Barnardo)
TCC director, Chris Thurman, knew that David’s return to South Africa was also a perfect opportunity to get this veteran Shakespearean in front of a microphone – to talk about Twelfth Night, Twaalfde Nag (Uys Krige’s Afrikaans translation), Shakespeare on Robben Island, director-less Shakespeares, South African prison writing and much more.
And, of course, there’s music. The Maynardville Twelfth Night is a bittersweet, Fellini-styled, jazz-infused production. Feste is played by David Viviers, in an interpretation described by Daily Maverick theatre critic Keith Bain as a transformation of the character “from a jester-in-tights into a Noël Coward-like scallywag, the sharp wit and witticisms and back-to-front logic simply barrelling out of him”. Schalkwyk, too, saw and heard Coward in Viviers’ Feste, both in his repartee and in the songs (for which Wessel Odendaal wrote new compositions). All of which is the perfect excuse for some cheerfully melancholic musical snippets - Noël Coward, and Jacques Brel too, for good measure.
Listen to Shake the Sword! on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your podcast platform of choice (check via RSS.com).
